Descartes’ physics is dependent on his metaphysics, which is to say, on knowledge of the nature of God and of the human soul. This is clear throughout Descartes’ work, but it is especially so in th...

Henry More (1614–1687), the most influential of the so-called Cambridge Platonists, and arguably the leading philosophically-inclined theologian in late seventeenth-century England, has come in for renewed attention lately. He was the subject of a detailed intellectual biography in 2003 by Robert Crocker, and in 2012 Jasper Reid published a philosophically penetrating and enlightening study of More’s metaphysics (Crocker 2003; Reid 2012). David Leech’s study of More’s idiosyncratic concept of immaterial spirit—and the role that it plays in his philosophy and theology—is (...) as detailed and penetrating as Reid’s study of his metaphysics, but perhaps more far-reaching in its ambitions. As the sub-title of this new book suggests, More’s philosophical theology is presented here as leading to the unintended consequence of promoting the incipient atheism of the early modern period.Leech’s study is clearly and helpfully structured in three parts and ten chapters. The first part, “Atheism and Spir .. (shrink)

The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana ...

This book offers the first sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for individualism and identifies the main (...) metaphysical assumptions underlying them. Since the topic is so central to the philosophy of mind, a discipline generating enormous research and debate at present, the book has implications for a very broad range of philosophical issues including the naturalisation of intentionality, psychophysical supervenience, the nature of mental causation, and the viability of folk psychology. (shrink)

"Cartesian Dualism" is a systematic examination of a version of mind-body dualism in light of recent work in the philosophy of mind and the theory of reference. I analyze Descartes' modal argument for dualism and argue that some of the principal objections against dualism are not decisive. The thesis is divided into five sections. ;The first section sets forth the main features of Descartes' ontology and his theory of mind. I defend Descartes' theory of individuation and discuss recent conceptions of (...) physical objects and properties. ;In the second section I argue that there are serious problems facing theories of mind that eliminate a phenomenological first person perspective. I criticize several attempts to analyze inverted spectrum and qualia thought experiments from a functionalist perspective. I also consider recent theories of reference which hold that a person's identification of her psychological state is dependent upon her physical environment and the conventional meaning of words. ;The third section examines several treatments of first person reference that are incompatible with Cartesian dualism. I review work by Malcolm, Anscombe, Kenny, Strawson, and Mackie. ;The fourth section outlines Descartes' arguments for mind-body dualism which appear in his major works and correspondence. I clarify the use of de re and de dicto modality in different versions of the modal argument and formulate that I take to be an at least prima facie plausible version of the argument. ;Section five focuses upon two major objections to dualism. The first is the dualism leads to intractable problems concerning the individuation of persons. The second challenges the dualist interactionist on the basis of an ostensibly plausible principle of causation. It seems that causal relations among particulars derive from relations among the particulars' properties and relations. It is not clear what properties and relations a nonphysical person might instantiate that would account for the causal relations between it and some physical object. I maintain that neither objection is decisive. (shrink)

Descartes and his early followers were widely seen to be enemies of superstition and the occult. This was particularly visible in the Cartesian movement’s antagonism to astrology. However, why Descartes and his early followers were so pitted against astrology is less than clear given the flexibility afforded to them through their system of philosophy and various mechanical explanations. Claude Gadroys (1642-1678), for example, produced a short treatise that provided a mechanical explanation consistent with Cartesian physics to allow for celestial influence (...) on Earth. In doing so, he exposed a contradiction in Cartesian vortex theory that seemed to disallow any such influence. In this way, Gadroys brought against himself and then dispelled one of the strongest objections to a Cartesian astrology. Oddly, no other Cartesian relied on principles specific to Cartesianism to argue against astrology as a legitimate science. This paper’s goal is to give a survey of some of the most prominent anti-astrological influences on Descartes, as well as some of the most prominent anti-astrological Cartesians in the second half of the 17th century. In doing this, I hope to show two things. First, in mainstream Cartesianism of the period, the anti-astrological sentiment was in no way part of the debate surrounding Descartes’ philosophy. Instead, ‘Cartesian’ anti-astrological arguments were based on well-worn arguments with an emphasis on experimental difficulties in establishing an astrological science. Second, the explanation for the curious lack of distinctly Cartesian anti-astrological arguments reflects an inherent flaw in Cartesianism; namely, it lacked the theoretical tools to completely rule out ‘occult’ sciences such as astrology. (shrink)

Roger Ariew presents a new account of Descartes as a philosopher who sought to engage his contemporaries and society. He argues that the Principles of Philosophy was written to rival Scholastic textbooks, and considers Descartes' enterprise in contrast to the tradition it was designed to replace and in relation to the works of the first Cartesians.

The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ISBN 90-247-0214-3. Most of Husserl's emendations, as given in the Appendix to that volume, have been treated as if they were part of the text. The others have been translated in footnotes. Secondary consideration has been given to a typescript (cited as "Typescript C") on which Husserl wrote in 1933: "Cartes. Meditationen (...) / Originaltext 1929 / E. Husserl / für Dorion Cairns". Its use of emphasis and quotation marks conforms more closely to Husserl’s practice, as exemplified in works published during his lifetime. In this respect the translation usually follows Typescript C. Moreover, some of the variant readings n this typescript are preferable and have been used as the basis for the translation. Where that is the case, the published text is given or translated in a foornote. The published text and Typescript C have been compared with the French translation by Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris, Armand Collin, 1931). The use of emphasis and quotation marks in the French translation corresponds more closely to that in Typescript C than to that in the published text. Often, where the wording of the published text and that of Typescript C differ, the French translation indicates that it was based on a text that corresponded more closely to one or the other – usually to Typescript C. In such cases the French translation has been quoted or cited in a foornote. (shrink)

The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing domains of knowledge according to the "order of reasons," was a powerful reductive tool. Descartes made significant strides in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics by relating certain complex items and problems back to more simple elements that served as starting points for his inquiries. But his reductive method also impoverished these domains in important ways, for it tended to restrict geometry to the study of straight line segments, physics to the study of (...) ambiguously constituted bits of matter in motion, and metaphysics to the study of the isolated, incorporeal knower. This book examines in detail the negative and positive impact of Descartes's method on his scientific and philosophical enterprises, exemplified by the Geometry, the Principles, the Treatise of Man, and the Meditations. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author presents some Cartesian thought experiments by reproducing an excerpt from The Meditations on First Philosophy. The author asks us to imagine that the physical world around us is an elaborate illusion. He imagines that the world was merely a dream or, worse yet, a hoax orchestrated by an evil demon bent on deceiving us. The author asks us to suppose that we are dreaming, and that some particulars ‐ namely, the opening of the eyes, the (...) motion of the head, the forth‐putting of the hands ‐ are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless, he says that, it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities. (shrink)

Non‐Cartesian substance dualism is a position in the philosophy of mind concerning the nature of the mind‐body relation or, more exactly, the person‐body relation. Whereas Cartesian substance dualism takes subjects of experience to be necessarily immaterial and indeed nonphysical substances, non‐Cartesian substance dualism does not insist on this. This distinctive feature of non‐Cartesian substance dualism gives it certain advantages over Cartesian dualism, without compelling it to forfeit any of the intuitive appeal that attaches to its more traditional rival. In this (...) chapter, the author's own view is that the self is indeed a simple substance. The simplicity of the self goes some way toward explaining its unity, including the unity of consciousness that characterizes its normal condition. A divided consciousness is in principle consistent with self‐identity: what is not consistent with this is a radical disunity of beliefs and values, manifested in a radical inconsistency of thought and action. (shrink)

: Descartes provides an original and puzzling argument for the traditional theological doctrine that the world is continuously created by God. His key premise is that the parts of the duration of anything are "completely independent" of one another. I argue that Descartes derives this temporal independence thesis simply from the principle that causes are necessarily simultaneous with their effects. I argue further that it follows from Descartes's version of the continuous creation doctrine that God is the instantaneous and total (...) cause of everything that happens, and that this is just what his physics demands. But although God is the total cause of everything, he is not the only cause, since Descartes considers it obvious that finite minds have the power to move bodies. In the face of this apparent paradox, several recent commentators have suggested that Descartes accepted the late scholastic view that God and finite causes somehow collaborate or concur in the production of numerically identical effects. But close examination reveals that the case for Cartesian concurrentism is weak. Fortunately, there is a simpler and more fruitful solution to the problem of reconciling divine and human action. I argue that that in Descartes's world certain motions, such as voluntary movements of our bodies, are causally overdetermined This account allows Descartes to avoid occasionalism without embracing an elaborate metaphysics of secondary causality. Finally, I argue that the overdeterminist interpretation sheds new light on two longstanding problems of Cartesian metaphysics. First, it resolves a serious difficulty with a standard reading of Descartes's conception of human freedom. Second, it offers a novel approach to the old problem of reconciling genuine human action with the principle of the conservation of total quantity of motion. (shrink)

The notion that something can exist a se is central to Descartes’s overall metaphysics of causation. In the Meditations, divine aseity plays the role of explaining not only God’s existence but ultimately the existence of everything else apart from God. Yet in the Meditations proper, as well as in the early Replies, Descartes does little to clarify exactly what his view of divine aseity is and how it might differ from the sort of aseity commonly posited by the Scholastics. Despite (...) Descartes’s later attempts to assuage this worry and clarify his position, the positive aseity charge has not gone away. Here I shall argue that the charge is unjustified on all counts. Baldly stated, Descartes’s notion of aseity is no different than the negative sense of aseity endorsed by his Scholastic predecessors - especially Aquinas. Understanding this not only helps in clarifying the overall picture of Cartesian causality but also aids in seeing how commentaries on the Meditations, old and new, have obscured it. (shrink)

This essay examines recent attempts to defend holenmerism, or the ‘whole in every part’ doctrine, as the preferred view of God’s relationship to the material world in the work of Descartes. By focusing on the interrelationship between space, matter, and immaterial entities in Cartesian philosophy, I will demonstrate that the textual evidence not only fails to provide support for the holenmerist revival, but that holenmerism also runs counter to many of Descartes’s concepts regarding space and bodily extension.

Purpose. To consider the personal nature of Cartesian metaphysics. Its implementation involves: a) outlining methodological changes in the philosophy of the twentieth century; b) analysis of ways to interpret anthropological component of philosophizing in Descartes studies; c) appeal to Descartes’ texts to clarify the authentic form of his interpretation of metaphysics. Theoretical basis. I base my view of Descartes’ legacy on the conceptual positions of phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. Originality. Based on Descartes’ own concept of teaching, the author substantiates the (...) personal nature of Cartesian metaphysics. Important prerequisites for its comprehension are attention to the ethical motive as the driving force of philosophizing and recognition of the importance of the poetic worldview. The idea of the basic role of poetics finds its meaningful confirmation in the texts of the philosopher, who interprets the main areas of philosophy as the forms of art. Conclusions. Based on his own vision of anthropology and metaphysics as the forms of completion of the revolution initiated by Copernicus, the author defends the idea of the constitutive presence of personality in Descartes’ metaphysics. In the process of studying the research literature, methodological guidelines are outlined in the form of the importance of personal determination of the search for truth, the key role of ethical motive and art as components of philosophizing. The thesis about the poetic form of presentation of metaphysics by Descartes as a form of fixation of its personal dimension is substantiated. (shrink)

The major Western monotheisms, and Christianity in particular, are often supposed to be committed to a substance dualism of a Cartesian sort. Aquinas, however, has an account of the soul which is non-Cartesian in character. He takes the soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but nonetheless realized in material components. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s account is coherent and philosophically interesting; in my view, it suggests not only that Cartesian dualism isn’t essential to Christianity but also (...) that the battle lines between dualism and materialism are misdrawn. (shrink)

This article discusses some essential differences between the Cartesian and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of child development. It argues that we should prefer the neo-Aristotelian conception since it is capable of resolving the problems the Cartesian conception is confronted by. This is illustrated by discussing the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian explanation of the development of volitional powers, and the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian simulation theory and theory–theory account of the development of social cognition. The neo-Aristotelian conception is further elaborated by (...) discussing how it differs from both behaviorism and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Bold and pioneering, this book makes a detailed historical and systematic case that Descartes's theory of knowledge is an elegant and powerful combination of a priori, naturalistic, and dialectical elements meriting serious consideration by both contemporary analytic philosophers and postmodern thinkers. In the course of making this case Thomas Vinci develops a broad reinterpretation of Cartesian thought that unlocks novel solutions to many of the most vexed questions in Cartesian scholarship.

In the Aristotelian curriculum, De anima or the study of the soul fell under the rubric of physics. This area of study covered the vital (“vegetative”), sensitive, and rational powers of the soul. Descartes’ substance dualism restricted reason or intellect, and conscious sensation, to human minds. Having denied mind to nonhuman animals, Descartes was required to explain all animal behavior using material mechanisms possessing only the properties of size, shape, position, and motion. Within the framework of certainty provided by the (...) metaphysical foundations of his physics, he posited such mechanisms in accordance with appropriately lessened standards of certainty. As Cartesianism (or the Cartesian revolution) spread, adherents offered survey textbooks or treatises of physics to replace the corresponding Aristotelian curriculum. These books typically discussed the role of experience in physics and the appropriate standard of certainty. A comprehensive Cartesian natural philosophy needed to mechanize the offices of the Aristotelian sensitive soul, including sense perception, memory, and cognitive and appetitive responses to the environment. Descartes’ Treatise on Man (1664) offered an initial explanatory program. This chapter examines the role of experience in the natural philosophy and mechanistic psychology of Descartes’ English follower Antoine Le Grand. He offered detailed accounts of the sensory and motor mechanisms shared by human and nonhuman animals (for which he claimed “physical certainty”). These frame his Cartesian psychology. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Teacher and Student Divine Will, Eternal Truths, the Laws of Nature Ideas Matter and the Void.

Although Descartes is often said to have coined the modern notion of ‘consciousness’, he defines it neither explicitly nor implicitly. This may imply (1) that he was not the first to use ‘conscientia’ in its modern, psychological sense, or (2) that he still used it in its traditional moral sense. In this paper, I argue for the latter assumption. Descartes used ‘conscientia’ according to the meaning we also find in texts of St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and later scholastics. Thus the (...) Cartesian conscientia is, technically speaking, a shared knowledge of the specific value of our thoughts as thoughts and at the same time the cause of this value. This means that it is not itself a kind of individual knowledge, awareness, or a particular thought. Rather, ‘conscientia’ refers to the evaluative knowledge of an ideal observer. (shrink)

Cartesian Empiricisms considers the role Cartesians played in the acceptance of experiment in natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. It aims to correct a partial image of Cartesian philosophers as paradigmatic system builders who failed to meet challenges posed by the new science’s innovative methods. Studies in this volume argue that far from being strangers to experiment, many Cartesians used and integrated it into their natural philosophies. Chapter 1 reviews the historiographies of early modern philosophy, science, and Cartesianism (...) and their recent critiques. The first part of the volume explores various Cartesian contexts of experiment: the impact of French condemnations of Cartesian philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century; the relation between Cartesian natural philosophy and the Parisian academies of the 1660s; the complex interplay between Cartesianism and Newtonianism in the Dutch Republic; the Cartesian influence on medical teaching at the University of Duisburg; and the challenges chemistry posed to the Cartesian theory of matter. The second part of the volume examines the work of particular Cartesians, such as Henricus Regius, Robert Desgabets, Jacques Rohault, Burchard de Volder, Antoine Le Grand, and Balthasar Bekker. Together these studies counter scientific revolution narratives that take rationalism and empiricism to be two mutually exclusive epistemological and methodological paradigms. The volume is thus a helpful instrument for anyone interested both in the histories of early modern philosophy and science, as well as for scholars interested in new evaluations of the historiographical tools that framed our traditional narratives. (shrink)

Although Descartes’ natural philosophy marked an important advance in the development of modern science, many of his specific concepts of science have been largely discarded, and consequently neglected, since their introduction in the seventeenth century. Many critics over the years, such as Newton (in his early paper De gravitatione), have presented a series of apparently devastating arguments against Descartes' theory of space and motion; a generally negative historical verdict which, moreover, most contemporary scholars accept. Nevertheless, it is also true that (...) most historians and philosophers of science have not sufficiently investigated the viability and effectiveness of the case against Cartesian space and motion. This book explores the success of the arguments against Descartes’ theory of space and motion by determining if it is possible to formulate a Cartesian theory of science that can avoid the problems raised by Newton, as well as by a host of other past and contemporary philosophers either sympathetic or hostile to the overall design of Cartesian science. In particular, if Descartes' theory of motion can be reconciled with his hypotheses on dynamics, then a Cartesian can successfully resolve the difficulties imposed by his critics. This book comprises, therefore, a sustained attempt to construct a consistent “Cartesian” spacetime theory: i.e., a theory of space and time that incorporates Descartes’ various theories of physics and nature without falling into the kinds of problems and contradictions as charged by, for example, Newton. (shrink)

This paper intends to deal with Condillacian Linguistics. Although the Condillacian philosophy of mind and analysis of language were the most important in the late eighteenth century, none of them is mentioned in Chomsky's work (1966, Cartesian Linguistics). It would be useful for the history of Western thought if Chomsky's monumental error were generally recognized and if Condillacian Linguistics were at last to find the place it rightly deserves. The main thesis of Condillac's linguistic ideas (language is the first step (...) in the analysis of thought) is briefly presented with reference to its context and consequences. (shrink)

How we understand Descartes’s physics rests on how we interpret his ontological commitment to individual bodies, and in particular on how we account for their individuation. However, Descartes’s contemporaries as well as contemporary philosophers have seen Descartes’s account of the individuation of bodies as deeply flawed. In the first part of this paper, I discuss how the various problems and puzzles involved in Descartes’s account of the individuation of bodies arise, and the relevance of these problems for his physics. With (...) an eye toward resolving these puzzles, I argue for an interpretation of the Cartesian ontology in which bodies are not individuated by motion but, instead, are mind-dependent. As part of this reading, I demonstrate the sense in which we can clearly and distinctly perceive bodies, and also the senses in which the real, conceptual, and modal distinctions apply to them. I conclude by explaining how this account of the mind-dependent individuation of bodies is consistent with Descartes’s definition of ‘motion’ and ‘a body’ in Principles, Part II, section 25—the very passage that prima facie entails the most troubling of the individuation puzzles. Finally, I show that this account is consistent with Descartes’s general goal in constructing his physics. (shrink)

In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in (...) the original edition has been translated, and the notes and bibliography have been brought up to date. The relationship between the original edition and contemporary biolinguistic work is also explained. This challenging volume is an important contribution to the study of language and mind, and to the history of these studies since the end of the sixteenth century. (shrink)

1. Those having a detailed and first-hand knowledge of Descartes’s work seem agreed that it was highly original, genuinely critical and of permanent importance in the history of thought. And though they would differ in opinion on what are the reasons best advanced in support of their estimate, a majority would seem to regard the “Cartesian revolution” as summing up what is most meritorious in Descartes’s philosophy and most lasting in his influence. They would find Professor E. Gilson speaking their (...) mind when he declares, “Sur ce qu’il y a de nouveau et de strictement original dans sa pensée, aucun doute ne saurait subsister. Descartes est la revendication personnifiée du mathématisme universel. (shrink)

In this short paper, I shall examine some key structural features of Descartes’s metaphysics, as it relates to mind–body dualism. The style of presentation will partly be one of rational reconstruction, designed to present the Cartesian system in a way that will be of maximal interest to contemporary metaphysicians. Section 1 focuses on five key Cartesian theses about principal attributes. Sections 2 and 3 examine how those theses play themselves out in Descartes’s discussion of mind–body dualism.

The philosopher René Descartes is usually associated with cold reason rather than with feeling, to the extent that Rousseau charged his philosophy had "slashed poetry's throat." Andrea Gadberry argues, on the contrary, that Descartes' thought was crucially enabled by early modern poetry and rhetoric. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of disembodied reason, Gadberry points to Descartes's own impassioned and poetic negotiations with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Gadberry's approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent (...) for the twenty-first: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Her book reveals an implicit poetics in Descartes' texts, from the puzzling forms of riddle, emblem, and anagram to the antecedents of more familiar, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry in love lyric and elegy. Gadberry's argument is grounded in the rich poetic culture of Descartes' time, even as it traces a biography of thinking. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic shape. This book will be the first volume published in the new Thinking Literature series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. (shrink)

Locke is often credited with having refuted the Cartesian account of the identity of persons, which locates their identity in the identity of immaterial substance. J. L. Mackie speaks for many when he writes that “Locke makes out a strong case for both his negative theses, that personal identity is to be equated neither with the identity of a soul-substance nor with that of a man …”. I will argue here that Locke’s attack on the immaterial substance theory is, if (...) viewed in the standard way, not only unsuccessful against the Cartesian theory but also unsuccessful even in its own terms. We will see, however, that Locke mingles this line of argument with another one which has not to my knowledge been remarked in the literature on Locke on personal identity; this line of argument is based on a deep agnosticism about the nature of thinking substance, and of substance generally, and it does succeed against a wide range of immaterial substance theories, but not, still, the Cartesian one. At the end of the paper I will make use of these results to sketch how two quite distinct strains of seventeenth-century thought about immaterial substance may be disentangled from each other. This should make us wary of the rather perfunctory characterizations of dualism, and particularly Cartesian dualism, which have been popular recently. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cartesian Skepticism from Bare PossibilityRobert WachbritIn making his case for skepticism, Peter Unger offers the following exotic case as one which “conforms to a familiar, if not often explicitly artic-ulated pattern or form” of skeptical reasoning: 1 imagine that there is an evil scientist who deceives subjects into falsely believing that there are rocks. Living in a world bereft of rocks, he induces belief in their existence using electrodes (...) implanted into the appropriate parts of the subjects’ brai ns, protoplasm, or systems through which he sends patterns of electrical impulses in accord with his deceptive designs. Unger then offers the following argument, which is supposed to instantiate the pattern or form of this kind of skeptical reasoning:If you know that there are rocks, then you can know that there is no such scientist doing this to you. But no one can ever know that there is no evil scientist who is, by means of electrodes, deceiving him into falsely believing there to be rocks. So... you never know that there are rocks. But of course we have chosen our person, and the matter of there being rocks, quite arbitrarily, and this argument... may be generalized to cover any external matter at all. From this, we may conclude... that nobody knows anything about the external world. 2After presenting this case and articulating its form, Unger claims that “this argument is the same in form as the ‘evil demon’ argument in Descartes’s [End Page 109] Meditations; it is but a more modern, scientific counter-part, with its domain of application confined to matters concerning the external world.” He then proceeds to describe Descartes’s argument as “the most compelling sceptical argument the phil osophical literature has to offer,” calling it in fact “the classical argument for scepticism.” 3These claims may seem a little bit surprising; for it is not obvious, even from the most careful attention to the text, that what is written about the evil demon in the First Meditation constitutes a skeptical argument at all, and the scholarly literature is generally, and perhaps surprisingly, quite confusing about just what is going on at the end of the First Meditation. Further, rather than being exceedingly compelling as Unger thinks, arguments of this form are not only assiduously avoided by Descarte s during his descent into skepticism but are in fact, as I shall argue with some help from Descartes, weak and considerably less compelling than the kind of skeptical challenges Descartes actually offers.My purpose in this paper, then, is to make two related points, one historical and the other philosophical. First, I will try to demonstrate, on the basis of both textual and critical evidence, that Descartes was not offering a (further and final) skeptica l argument when he invented his demon. I will try to exhibit some of the confusions in the scholarly literature about the text of the last three paragraphs of the First Meditation and, by so doing, support Gouhier’s position that the idea of the demon “ha s no metaphysical significance; it is purely a methodological artifice which permits doubt to continue....” 4 Second, I will show that embodied in Descartes’s rejection of this kind of skeptical reasoning is the very reason for its weakness, a weakness that should prevent it from being considered, as Unger considers it, the classical form of skeptical argument. The inventions of the First Meditation still exercise considerable hold on our philosophical imaginations. I hope to show that, at least as far as the demon is concerned, Descartes would have been surprised at some of the most conventional and entrenched scholarly interpretations given his use of it and not at all sympathetic to its employment in a skeptical argument. Lest the demon seem an old and tired subject of philosophical scrutiny, let me beg the reader’s indulgence by promising both a deeper than usual look into the text of the end of the First Meditation and some significant conclusions about Cartesian skepticism that are hardly commonplace and thus neither old nor tired. [End Page 110]I. The Textual EvidenceThe demon makes its first appearance in the last paragraph of the... (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: I examine the authors’ concept of relational cognition, showing that it has two possible readings, both more “cartesian” than the authors suppose. Whence the authors’ “anti-cartesianism,” then? I suggest it is due to an understanding of cognition that allows cognition to operate at very long timescales, and provide an argument to resist such an understanding.

This paper raises objections to what I call the Cartesian Doxastic Argument for free will: the argument that it is probably true that we are free on the grounds that there is already widespread intuitive belief in that claim. Richard Swinburne provides the best extant defense of the argument, using his principle of credulity, which holds that beliefs are probably true merely on the believer’s evidence that they believe it. I argue that the PoC is either too liberal, justifying intuitively (...) unjustified beliefs, or else is inapplicable in practice. I then show that attempts to reformulate the principle to avoid liberality render it too weak to support the Cartesian Doxastic Argument. These failures suggest that any version of the argument that relies on similar principles is likely to fail. (shrink)

In the history of the scientific revolution, Descartes is often considered as the mechanical philosopher par excellence, and opposed as such to the founder of mechanical science, that is to say, Galileo: this cliché is not without foundation, but it must not make us forget that Descartes was himself a practitioner of mechanical science. In the article "Cartesian Mechanics" I detail the meaning and reach of "mechanics" in the Cartesian corpus, and do so in three steps. 1. I begin by (...) explaining the genesis of the thesis which states that there is no difference between the physical and the mechanical; this thesis is so famous that it is often imagined that it is constituted in Descartes's first writings. But we can in fact show that the first works of Descartes and Beeckman arise from a "physico-mathematical" practice which does not necessarily imply a complete reworking of traditional physics, even if it might have favored the Cartesian ambition for a physics as certain as geometry; it was only in the late 1630s that Descartes began to systematically affirm the identity of physics and mechanics, or of "rules of motion", of "laws of Nature" and of "laws of mechanics". I then analyze the consequences of this affirmation. 2. In the second part of this article I provide a step-by-step commentary of the response proposed by Descartes in a letter to Mersenne in July 1638 to the question raised by Beaugrand's Geostatice (...) dissertatio mathematica (1636), that is to say the question of whether a body weighs more when it is farther from the center of Earth than when it is close. Compared with other texts of the Cartesian corpus, this sample of mechanics has been little analyzed (to my knowledge, the only analyses are those of P. Duhem, P. Costabel, A. Gabbey and D. Garber). This text is nonetheless extremely interesting: Descartes responds to the geostatic question in turn in terms of physics, then mathematics; even more interesting, the examination of the details of his procedures allows us to confront Cartesian statics to other writings, whether those of Guidobaldo del Monte, Galileo, Stevin, Mersenne or Roberval. 3. In the third and final section, I analyze the reasons that lead Descartes to exclude velocity from his statics, I examine the difficulties that his explanation of gravity created for statics, and conclude with the confrontation between mechanical philosophy and mechanical science in the case of Descartes. (shrink)

This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as “intellectual work.” (...) When embodied in the Taxonomy, Cartesian assumptions foster a fundamental disposition in front of reality that is ultimately alienating. The paper begins with an explication of the Taxonomy’s affordances and philosophical assumptions. I then identify the Cartesian elements of these assumptions, particularly the Taxonomy’s inherent mind–body dualism and primacy of method. Finally, the paper employs these elements as an explanatory factor for the predominant critiques of the Taxonomy in educational theory literature. An addendum questions the possibility or plausibility of distance from objectives frameworks in the contemporary classroom. (shrink)

This paper argues that a Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds might actually be an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that some crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been looked for or collected. What we require is evidence that a belief in the self-transparency of mind is universal to the human species. The paper closes with a call to anthropologists (and perhaps also developmental psychologists), who are in a position to collect such evidence, (...) encouraging them to do so. (shrink)